Tag archives for career

Job interviews can be pretty tough in your first language but imagine doing one in your second! You need to be well prepared and the more “real” you can make it, the more successful your practice will be. As someone who believes in video as a great medium to bring “reality” into the English language […]

One of my goals this coming school year is to be more personal in my writing/blogging. I know I am guilty of sharing precious little about myself. I pontificate, philosophize, condemn, encourage but in that, I share little of “who I am”. I don’t want to be that kind of writer, blogger or secret sharer. […]

This story comes from my time teaching at Bloor and Bay, 5th floor, N.E tower – Language Connections International. I was teaching new immigrants to Canada part of the day, foreign students the other half. Small classrooms with one wall all windows facing busy Bloor street, downtown Toronto. I was teaching a usual class, reviewing […]

Today, went out for a nice bike ride with “my old man”. He’s almost 70 and he kicked my butt! Truly. I’ll admit I’m not in great shape anymore but watching my dad, “power in” the last 20 k of our ride, me lagging behind – gave me pause. The guy just doesn’t age and […]

In the mid to late 90’s I was teaching new immigrants to Canada, downtown Toronto. It was a government program and all new immigrants with lower level language fluency would get paid for up to a year, if they regularly attended language lessons. I’ve written previously about this, here. It was a great time. Friday […]

Looking for a job ain’t easy. It can be frightening and stressful. So much you have to attend to and on top of it all, you have to stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, us TEFLers seem to change jobs much more than regular subject teachers. We are the gauchos of the educational world. Last […]

Yep, time to get serious, school is starting! In keeping with this year’s promise to be more personal on my blog, I have some news of my comings and goings. I’ll be starting to teach at the university I attended for my own B.Ed. After a year off, relocating back to Canada, working fervently (and […]

Yesterday, went out for a nice bike ride. Beautiful weather, wind at my back and then baam! a flat. So I had to walk my bike home. The benefit of this was that I could slow down, think, become more aware of my surroundings. One thing I noticed was a poster tacked to a telephone […]

This morning during my usual coffee and book – came across the above quote. It really got me thinking about the reasons many EFL teachers (or others), pack their bags and leave home behind. It is relatively easier to “take off” these days. Not so much isolation, faster travel, the world is getting smaller. Still, […]

Just a short post. I’ve not been posting much lately, for a few reasons: A) been hard at work on several web projects and a redesign on EFL Classroom 2.0 B) Reading and looking at years worth of my old writings C) Building this – a Treadmill Desk. Now you probably already, for numerous reasons […]

{ I think this a great reflective activity for any teacher. Going to make this part of the curriculum in some of my future courses, for sure } What subjects have you been teaching? What types of students do you have? I’ve been teaching TESOL, both certificate and graduate students but recently moved back to Canada […]

I know I’ll take a lot of flak for this and I know it isn’t the standard way to go when talking about “teaching” (the standard approach being to talk about what is “good” teaching), however, during my years of helping teachers, I’ve come upon some warning signs that set off alarm bells and signal […]